Homeworld 2

One small step for an RTS.

Homeworld 2 is a sort of misguided reworking of Homeworld, halfway between a rehash and a remodeling job, but with the interesting bits sanded off. The vividly distinct sides added in the Cataclysm expansion are gone, the clean interface is now a mess, and much of the strategy has been methodically cut out. What you get in exchange for all this is better graphics.

Of course, if you're not familiar with Relic's original Homeworld and Barking Dog's Cataclysm expansion, you might not notice any of this. Instead, you'll be introduced to an RTS in true three-dimensional space in which you maneuver fleets of spacecraft into epic battles and watch from wherever you want. Homeworld's appeal is only partly the thrill of building units and sending them into battle; the real hook here is that you can play movie director and enjoy the spectacle from any angle or zoom. And it looks fantastic. Swarms of fighters zip along the tips of colored trails, midsized frigates trundle around and pick off their targets, and huge, pokey capital ships drift in from behind to mop up. The detail and special effects have been punched up as high as modern hardware can bearand then some (framerates suffer in bigger battles). Visually, Homeworld 2 is one of the most rewarding real-time strategy games you can play.

There are two sides here, with minor differences. Basically, the good guys get ion beams and a shield ship, and the bad guys get pointy ships that fire missiles and they can build hyperspace gates. But there's nothing here like the clever Beast race introduced in Cataclysm, much less the unique ship capabilities and tech advances. With so few ship classes, the simplified resource model, and almost no terrain in space, there isn't much breadth to Homeworld 2.

One of the most noticeable changes is the bigger and more conventional interface, with panels crowded around the edges of the screen. The previous games had a minimal interface that gave you the sense of floating in space. Now you're peering at little ships through a computer monitor. The new untethered viewing system makes camera control more confusing. Instead of selecting ships from a text list, you have to memorize silhouettes on big, fat buttons. Over each ship's health bar are informative icons that only appear at certain zoom levels. Fighters and corvettes are now squadrons instead of individual units, which makes everything look busier without adding much functionality. There's no easy way to distinguish between multiple building facilities. What happened to the streamlined elegance of Homeworld's old interface?

The old system of formations is gone, replaced with a muddled system of strike groups, control groups, and behavior settings. Experience and upgrades for specific ships are gone, giving them all a disposable feel in which one ship is like every other ship of its kind. The end result is that you're encouraged to just build your ships and throw them together into a computer-controlled mob that can behave unpredictably. Homeworld 2 puts a new emphasis on building specific counterunits, so your choice of what units to build is more important than what you do with them. You're more of a shipyard administrator than an admiral.

For instance, bombers kill destroyers, fighters kill bombers, gunships kill fighters, frigates kill gunships, and destroyers kill frigates. There are enough variations that you need a flow chart to figure it all out. And the rules are dramatic enough that without playing by the flow chart, you're going to lose. In fact, many of the single-player missions are like puzzles in which you have to figure out the right combination to counter enemy ships.

Dead Space
The ships move so quickly, they're so disposable, and the maps are so small that hyperspace travel, cloaking, and disabling/capturingall important elements of the previous gamestake a backseat to just building the right guns and slugging it out. There are other important elements of the original Homeworld now missing: support modules for unit limits, spending time instead of money for research, and being able to build multiple ships simultaneously at a production facility. These might seem like minor nits, but they have a serious impact on the way the game plays. There is now a hard limit on how many ships of each class you can have, you're forced to spend money to buy research from a dull tech tree, and each production facility can only build one ship at a time, whether it's a costly battle cruiser or a cheap fighter. These changes suck a lot of variety from gameplay, discouraging bold strategies and shunting players into homogenous approaches with only minor tweaks.

There's still a decent and slightly awkward game here. But as a sequel, Homeworld 2 is an upgrade for the graphics and a step backward for the gameplay. Perhaps Homeworld 0.9 would have been a more fitting title.